For 1 year, Toyota Japan gets a brand-new 30-year-old Land Cruiser

Don't call it a comeback...

Here's the tragedy of the Land Cruiser Series 70: it was never sold in the United States. The toughest and most rugged of the entire lineup is an icon in Australia and South Africa, where they've been on sale continuously for 30 years. And for 20 of those years, you could walk into a Japanese Toyota dealer and plunk down a pile of yen for a Series 70 pickup or SUV.

While the Series 70 soldered on in other markets, for 10 years, Japanese enthusiasts begged the company to bring back the stalwart truck. For the Land Cruiser's 30th anniversary, they're going to. There's one catch and one silver lining. The catch is that they'll only be sold for a year in Japan, and then it's off into the sunset, again, for the 70. The silver lining is that at current exchange rates and excluding taxes, they'll be the equivalent of $34,650 US, which seems like a steal. I can't imagine a SUV this big selling for less than $50k in the US, ancient and bare-bones or not.

Good news for Japan, and the same bad news as the past 30 years for Americans. Meanwhile, in Australia, they don't know what all the fuss is about, because the variants of the Series 70 they get make the boring quad-cab pickup and regular SUV versions in Japan look like 4WD Camrys. In Australia, they offer snorkel-equipped 70s in a single cab pickup and a troop-carrying version that seats up to 11 people. And while the Japanese 30th Anniversary Edition makes do with the standard corporate 4-liter 1GR-FE V6 found in most of the company's trucks, the Australian models get the stump-pulling 1VD-FTV turbodiesel V8 with 583 lb-ft of torque.

With a structure dating back to 1984, we'll never see a brand new LHD Series 70 sold here. But remember, the 25-year rule means importing RHD versions from abroad is a real possibility.